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Patreon Weekly #32 - Jan 13th 2020 (Patreon)

Published:
2020-01-14 04:58:21
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hey Patrons!

Apologies for the delay in this weekly, I've been busy with various work including getting DM-300 ready, and writing the 2020 blog post.

The 2020 blog post is finished and I'm planning to post it... right now! You can go and read it Here. There's a fair bit of overlap with the plans for 2019 post, but a bunch of new stuff as well. Of course, as I get towards actually implementing the features, you guys will be the first to hear about them in detail.

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The DM-300 fight is still progressing towards completion, but I've been having a hard time focusing on it due to other work and distractions, hence the longer time to completion. Everything is full functional and tied together, and I'm just working on visuals and other polish. I'm going to try to get beta-3.0 out with the DM rework around the middle of this week.

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I've also been taking a look at the balance of the game currently in beta-2.2:

- The caves and city are doing really well overall compared to 0.7.5. There's been a very slight bump in difficulty overall but the overall curve of that difficulty is much smoother. Previously there were some spikes on floors 11/12, and 16/17, now the rates of player death are much more steady between floors.

- However, There is a notable difficulty spike on floor 7, likely due to guards. While there haven't been any changes there in the beta, this is likely caused by them no longer dropping health potions. I'm going to tone guards down a bit, and boost necromancers slightly to compensate. 

- The Demon halls are still showing as more difficult than in 0.7.5, which wasn't my intention. I'm going to be making changes to ripper demons to both make them less of a straight gear-check, and hopefully more interesting. If necessary I might also tweak regular demon halls enemies to spawn slightly less often, to compensate for rippers spawning in addition to them.

Comments

Fish

I am very excited to see the Shattered blog now! Everything I expected was there. As I have so far, I will continue to support you.

Fulvio

I guess you have in plan to improve the cornucopia. I rarely end up using it with any class but the warrior, because I usually run out of food for the upgrades and I can't stand the regeneration rate of the artifact (I admit I may not be good at managing it). I think you have some idea already, but I was thinking of receiving some benefit based on the amount of food one consume every time the artifact is used, something like the Frozen carpaccio.

D

Wow this is so exciting. One thing I would love to see (perhaps as a a UI enhancement for the ingame supporter levels) would be more quickslots. Another row of 5 slots on top of the standard 4+backpack, would be amazing!

Shattered Pixel
>>31103660

The tricky thing about quickslots is that I don't really want to encourage the game to be about using even more items. Having 4 on quick-access is already a lot and the fact that people want more speaks to the game getting a little bloated in terms of item use. I didn't talk about this in the 2020 blog as it's too specific, but I want to try to make ways for players to condense some of these items together. Alchemy is the obvious place for something like this to fit (and already does it a bit for consumables), so I'd like to work on that first before just adding more slots.

Shattered Pixel
>>31101988

The horn of plenty is sort of boring because food is boring (except blandfruit of course), I might like to try and just have more interesting interactions with food as the game develops, but we'll have to see. One things to note about the horn is that it recharges with exp, not time, which might be why it feels slow to you.

Zrp200

Adding an enemy to halls that spawns independently of other mobs is going to increase difficulty (unless they are total jokes, which kind of ruins the fun aspect) without having adjustments to the existing mobs. Of course, it's clear that you intend for the hp potion to counterbalance the added difficulty, but at this stage of the game an extra HP potion probably won't matter as much. My actual opinion on rippers is that they are more or less fine. They really aren't super threatening by themselves. They do synergize with Evil Eyes and Scorpios, which makes wandering rippers more threatening on floors 23 and 24 (doubly so on 24 thanks to 2 spawners). Actually removing the second spawner on f24 may be beneficial, now that I think about it. The Scorpio-Ripper synergy can actually be scary if the player happens to be caught between a ripper and a scorpio. I'm finding spawners to be hassle to fight, or in some cases downright lethal. Fighting spawners can easily turn into a nightmare thanks to swarming of the things, which can easily result in the usage of one or more hp pots to actually successfully kill the spawner and get out alive. Floor 24 is just that x2, and if an Evil Eye or Scorpio just happens to walk in while you do this, it just gets that much more difficult. Imo fixing that could be found in * making spawner damage resistance lower or removing it altogether (burst damage builds are especially susceptible to multiple rippers, often turning into a convincing reason to rush past them instead) * Lowering spawn rate of rippers when the spawner is attacked (reduce swarm density) * Removing the second demon spawner from d24 Basically, nerf spawners.. Nerfing halls enemies is probably a necessary step as well, but I don't think that is the only measure that should be taken, especially for when not killing spawners is punished.

Shattered Pixel
>>31134627

Keep in mind that I also substantially buffed the drops of all demon halls enemies, I was hoping that might counterbalance things a bit as well. I haven't settled on exactly what to do with rippers but I agree with the general criticism that they're very simple. I was originally considering upping their spawn rate and nerfing their stats, but this will probably just pull them more towards 'joke' territory. I'm now experimenting with giving them a fairly simple ability and adjusting spawn rates and stats to compensate. For the moment I'll likely just nudge down general spawn rates in the halls in beta-3.0 as a shorter-term fix.